A few years ago on a winter trip to Yellowstone National Park, @benjaminolsonphotography and I spotted a coyote moving through an extremely tall and dense stand of sage brush in beautiful afternoon light. Rather than trying to follow it or get closer, I quietly moved passed where I last saw the coyote and sat down in the thick sage brush and waited. Within moments this gorgeous coyote moved silently passed me, paying me almost no attention.

Today is #worldwildlifeday, and while we shouldn’t need a designated day to celebrate the millions of non human species we share this rock with, it certainly can’t hurt! This image of a mother bobcat and her two kittens represents what is still my favorite and most cherished wildlife encounter to date, taken when I was 13 years old in Badlands National Park.

Coyotes seem to thrive in Yellowstone’s harsh winters. I’ve noticed that some coyotes remain extremely wary of the sight of people in the park, leaving the scene if they spot you from several hundred yards away, while others seem to display absolutely no care towards humans at all. It makes me wonder if this is due to personality differences or if some are habituated through intentional feeding. I hope the latter is not the case.

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Had a fun couple days exploring Yellowstone with my pal @ianlawson28 last weekend. It’s always a privilege to be able to so easily spend time with magnificent animals like this bull elk who we spent several hours watching as he lazily grazed in the same spot all day long.

“As I sat there on the rock I realized that, in spite of the closeness of civilization and the changes that hemmed it in, this remnant of the old wilderness would speak to me of silence and solitude, of belonging and wonder and beauty. Though the point was only a small part of the vastness, from it I could survey the whole.” -Sigurd Olson

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” -Henry Beston

This will be my last post at least for a little while in my reworking of my Alaskan brown bear portfolio. It’s amazing how time can make you go back and see a project in a new light. It was also fun to relive these amazing experiences in the process of reediting them.

In wildlife photography, as in portrait photography, perspective can absolutely make or break an image. There are millions of photos of Alaskan brown bears standing in a river, but by lying down in the middle of the river and holding the lens an inch or two above the rushing water, a somewhat unique image presented itself. This was also taken just a moment before my waders totally flooded.

Not only was this mother brown bear one of the most beautiful bears I’ve ever seen in my life, she was also one of the most relaxed. She didn’t seem fazed watching over her three little devils, but sometimes she’d join in on the wrestling match just so they knew who was still the boss.